Marlon Wayans

Miss Congeniality shows up The Other Guys in this riotously funny buddy-cop comedy, which overcomes its silly script with the ingenious pairing of Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy. The plot is essentially a flimsy framework on which to hang a series of nutty set pieces, but they're so hilarious that we don't mind at all.

Bullock plays Ashburn, an FBI agent who endangers her upcoming promotion by being too obsessively efficient and showing up the boys. Her boss (Bichir) thinks she could use some new scenery, so sends her to Boston to find a drug kingpin. But she quickly encroaches on the turf of local detective Mullins (McCarthy), whose outside-the-box methods have deeply intimidated her frazzled chief (Wilson). As they investigate the same case, Ashburn and Mullins clash badly before they realise that they really should be working together. But neither is willing to relinquish even a tiny bit of control.

It's hard to remember the last time two over-40 actresses were allowed to play such lively characters. Bullock and McCarthy have a fantastic snap of chemistry on-screen, as they improvise much of their hysterical interaction. This is a terrific combination of Bullock's fearless slapstick physicality and McCarthy's stinging humour. They're a lot funnier when they're at each others' throats than when they're working together, although even then they use deadpan humour to play on their differences. And in another clever flip of the genre, the male actors all have thankless roles around the edges of the story.

Continue reading: The Heat Review

Yet another spoof from Wayans and Alvarez, this movie isn't nearly as bad as it could have been (they also produced the resolutely unfunny Scary Movie 2 and Dance Flick). There's the germ of a clever idea here, mainly satirising the Paranormal Activity series in the context of a new relationship. But of course, they can't resist resorting to random pastiche and silly gross-out jokes instead of actually clever comedy.

Wayans plays Malcolm, a cheeky guy who is far too thrilled that his girlfriend Kisha (Atkins) is moving in with him. She's a little more reticent about it all, especially because she thinks there's a ghost creeping around the house. So Malcolm installs a security camera system, secretly hoping to videotape their sex life. As the paranormal shenanigans increase, their friends (Ubach and Daly) introduce them to a psychic (Swardson) and then a priest (Cedric). And it turns out that Kisha has a history with evil spirits.

Filmmaker Tiddes plays merrily with the found footage genre, shooting everything as if through a video camera, webcam or CCTV, while indulging in the format's voyeuristic possibilities. This gives the premise, of a couple moving in together, a smart kick. So it's very frustrating when some genuinely amusing scenes are interrupted for cheap toilet gags and only weakly comical set pieces. After setting things up, the screenwriters just get lazy and stop bothering to make scenes funny or engaging at all.

Continue reading: A Haunted House Review

Technically speaking, "Scary Movie 2" is a real mess. The editing is pathetic, mostly because the script -- if you can call it that -- is just a series of unrelated horror movie japes put in almost random order and tied together by about two minutes of plot.

Characters disappear completely from the story without explanation and blatant continuity errors abound because some gags where left on the cutting room floor while the follow-up jokes were kept. In one scene a character is lying in a pool of blood, then a second later the blood is gone. Then it's back, then it's gone again, then it's back again. No attempt whatsoever is made to cover up this sloppy, choppy, rushed-into-production total lack of cohesion.

But comedically speaking, "Scary Movie 2" is an almost constant laugh riot of extreme gross-out humor and surprisingly limber lampoonery -- and this is coming from a guy who didn't think much of the first "Scary Movie" and was pretty irritated when the Wayans brothers (director Keenen Ivory and stars Shawn and Marlon) broke their promise not to make a sequel.

Continue reading: Scary Movie 2 Review

The Coen Brothers flopped with last year's comedically clumsy and questionably hammy "Intolerable Cruelty," and now that they have repeated and amplified the same arched-performance mistakes in "The Ladykillers," I am beginning to understand what it is about Joel and Ethan's movies that their detractors dislike so much.

The characters in the Coens' recent comedies have frequently been oblivious to the world beyond their whimsical capers, and in these last two pictures even the protagonists have become objects for audience ridicule, making them poor surrogates for getting us involved in their stories.

Tom Hanks takes that bullet in this loose remake of a 1955 British laffer about a band of crooks inadvertently foiled by the little old landlady who rents them a room. All toothy, affected mannerisms and blabbering balderdash as the endlessly loquacious supposed mastermind of the criminal enterprise, his character is nothing but caricature -- an over-educated, old-fashioned, pocket-watch-and-hankie type Southern gentleman who goes by the tongue-tying moniker of Professor Goldthwait Higginson Dorr, Ph.D.

Continue reading: The Ladykillers Review